Woodward: Obama repeatedly lied about responsibility for budget sequester cuts

President Barack Obama and former White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew repeatedly lied by last year by claiming congressional Republicans were responsible for the looming $85 billion cut in the federal budget through sequestration, according to The Washington Post editor Bob Woodward.

Based on interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved in budget planning, Obama personally approved Lew’s plan to propose the mandatory trigger to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in July 2011.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/23/w...lity-for-budget-sequester-cuts/#ixzz2LjdWLZTY

 

Obama’s sequester deal-changer

Bob Woodward ([email protected]) is an associate editor of The Post. His latest book is “The Price of Politics.” Evelyn M. Duffy contributed to this column.

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.


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